A typical large business organization includes numerous teams of people, with one or more specific tasks assigned to each of the teams. A traditional business tends to define its teams in terms of the business' chain of command (i.e. the reporting chain). For example, a typical business sales division has a number of sales teams, each led by a manager who reports to a vice president of sales. In this type of chain-of-command structure, members of a sales team are “direct reports” of their manager. Other members of the organization typically must coordinate activities with a sales team member through that member's reporting structure. An entity such as a business organization thus typically includes numerous subsidiary entities such as teams and individuals, and some of those entities are subordinate to others, according to the command chain or according to other relationship rules.
Companies generally identify certain strategic and tactical goals, which they believe will lead the company to success. Specifically, managers typically establish goals for their reporting units, and employees are also often encouraged to set personal goals.
Recently, business leaders have come to recognize a number of advantages associated with adopting more flexible strategies for organizing teams and setting goals to supplement the rigid, hierarchical reporting structures traditionally found in large organizations. For example, rather than requiring all team members to have the same supervisor, a more flexible strategy allows at least some teams to include members from different levels of a reporting chain and/or from different reporting chains. Teams with members from different reporting chains are considered cross-functional teams. For instance, a sales manager may be assigned to a product development team charged with creating a salable product. Such a cross-functional team increases the likelihood that a developed product will be commercially viable.
Similarly, another flexible strategy for organizing teams and setting goals allows team leaders to set team goals but does not require strict adherence to a conventional reporting chain when choosing team leaders. By adopting flexible and dynamic strategies for managing teams and goals, organizations facilitate more rapid and effective adaptation to changes in the business environment, provided that those strategies are well implemented.
A disadvantage associated with flexible and dynamic strategies for organizing teams and goals, however, is that such strategies typically result in team and goal structures with increased complexity, compared to traditional chain-of-command strategies for managing teams and goals. For example, effective personal goals align with team goals and organization-wide goals. In a flexible and dynamic environment, however, organization-wide, team, and personal goals are rarely static, as company objectives, products, personnel responsibilities, and personnel team memberships may frequently change in response to changing conditions in a realistic business environment.
Flexible and dynamic strategies for managing teams and goals are therefore typically much more difficult to implement. Although conventional management information systems (MISs) may provide basic functionality for storing static goals, conventional MISs generally lack facilities for overcoming the difficulties associated with flexible and dynamic strategies for managing teams and goals.